‘Always in wood?’
‘Yes. Wood breathes. In wooden casks all spirit grows blander but if you put it in metal or glass containers instead it stays the same for ever. You could keep newly distilled spirits a thousand years in glass and when you opened it it would be as raw as the day it was bottled.’
‘One lives and learns,’ he said.
‘Anyway,’ I added after a pause. ‘Practically no one sells pure grain whisky. Even the cheapest bulk whisky is a blend of grain and malt, though the amount of malt in some of them is like a pinch of salt in a swimming pool.’
‘Flora said you told her some of the scotch at the Silver Moondance was like that,’ McGregor said.
‘Yes, it was. They were selling it in the bar out of a Bell’s bottle, and in the restaurant as Laphroaig.’
McGregor called for the bill. ‘This wasn’t my case to begin with,’ he said almost absentmindedly as he sorted out a credit card. ‘One of my colleagues passed it on to me because it seemed to be developing so close to my own doorstep.’
‘Do you mean,’ I asked, surprised, ‘that your firm were already interested in the Silver Moodance?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But how? I mean, in what connection?’
‘In connection with some stolen scotch that we were looking for. And it seems, my dear Tony, that you have found it.’
‘Good grief,’ I said blankly. ‘And lost it again.’
‘I’m afraid so. We’re very much back where we started. But that’s hardly your fault, of course. If Jack’s secretary had been less fond of Laphroaig... if Larry Trent hadn’t invited him to dinner... One can go back and back saying “if”, and it’s profitless. We were treading delicately towards the Silver Moondance when the horsebox plunged into the marquee; and it’s ironic in the extreme that I didn’t know that the Arthur Lawrence Trent who owned that place had horses in training with Jack, and I didn’t know he was at the party. I didn’t know him by sight... and I didn’t know that he was one of the men we found dead. If I’d known he was going to be at the party I’d have got Jack or Flora to introduce me.’ He shrugged, ‘If and if.’
‘But you were... um... investigating him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ McGregor said pleasantly. ‘The person we suspected was an employee of his. A man called Zarac’
I’m sure my mouth physically dropped open. Gerard McGregor placidly finished paying the bill, glancing with dry understanding at my face.
‘Yes, he’s dead,’ he said. ‘We really are totally back at the beginning.’
‘I don’t consider,’ I said intensely, ‘that Zarac is a matter of no crocodiles.’
I spent most of Saturday with my fingers hovering over the telephone, almost deciding at every minute to ring Flora and ask her for Gerard McGregor’s number so that I could cancel my agreement for Sunday. If I did nothing he would turn up at two o’clock and whisk me off heaven knew where to meet his client, the one whose scotch had turned up on my tongue. (Probably.)
In the end I did ring Flora but even after she’d answered I was still shilly-shallying.
‘How’s Jack?’ I said.
‘In a vile temper, I’m afraid, Tony dear. The doctors won’t let him come home for several more days. They put a rod right down inside his bone, through the marrow, it seems, and they want to make sure it’s all settled before they let him loose on crutches.’
‘And are you all right?’
‘Yes, much better every day.’
‘A friend of yours,’ I said slowly, ‘came to see me. Er... Gerard McGregor.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Flora said warmly. ‘Such a nice man. And his wife’s such a dear. He said you and he together had helped a good few people last Sunday. He asked who you were, and I’m afraid, Tony dear, that I told him quite a lot about you and then about everything that happened at the Silver Moondance, and he seemed frightfully interested though it seems to me now that I did go on and on a bit.’
‘I don’t think he minded,’ I said soothingly. ‘Um... what does he do, do you know?
‘Some sort of business consultant, I believe. All those jobs are so frightfully vague, don’t you think? He’s always travelling all over the place, anyway, and Tina... that’s his wife... never seems to know when he’ll be home.’
‘Have you known them long?’ I asked.
‘We met them at other people’s parties several times before we really got to know them, which would be about a year ago.’
‘I mean... has he always lived near here?’
‘Only about five years, I think. They were saying the other evening how much they preferred it to London even though Gerard has to travel more. He’s such a clever man, Tony dear, it just oozes out of his pores. I told him he should buy some wine from you, so perhaps he will.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Er... do you have his telephone number?’
‘Of course,’ Flora said happily, and found it for me. I wrote it down and we disconnected, and I was still looking at it indeterminately at nine o’clock when I closed the shop.
‘I half expected you to cry off,’ he said, when he picked me up at two the next day.
‘I half did.’
‘But?’
‘Curiosity, I suppose.’
He smiled. Neither of us pointed out that it was curiosity that got the Elephant’s Child into deep trouble with the crocodiles in the Limpopo River, though it was quite definitely in my mind, and Gerard, as he had told me to call him, was of the generation that would have had the Just So Stories fed to him as a matter of course.
He was dressed that afternoon in a wool checked shirt, knitted tie and tweed jacket, much like myself, and he told me we were going to Watford.
I sensed a change in him immediately I’d committed myself and was too far literally along the road to ask him to turn back. A good deal of surface social manner disappeared and in its place came a tough professional attitude which I felt would shrivel irrelevant comment in the utterer’s throat. I listened therefore in silence, and he spoke throughout with his eyes straight ahead, not glancing to my face for reactions.
‘Our client is a man called Kenneth Charter,’ he said.‘Managing Director and Founder of Charter Carriers, a company whose business is transporting bulk liquids by road in tankers. The company will transport any liquid within reason, the sole limiting factor being that it must be possible to clean the tanker thoroughly afterwards, ready for a change of contents. Today’s hydrochloric acid, for instance, must not contaminate next week’s crop-sprayer.’
He drove steadily, not fast, but with easy judgement of available space. A Mercedes, fairly new, with velvety upholstery and a walnut dash, automatic gears changing on a purr.
‘More than half of their business,’ he went on, ‘is the transport of various types of inflammable spirit, and in this category they include whisky.’ He paused. ‘It’s of course in their interest if they can arrange to pick up one load near to where they deliver another, the limiting factor again being the cleaning. They have steam cleaning facilities and chemical scrubbing agents at their Watford headquarters, but these are not readily available everywhere. In any case, one of their regular runs has been to take bulk gin to Scotland, wash out the tanker with water, and bring scotch back.’
He stopped talking to navigate through a town of small streets, and then said, ‘While the scotch is in the tanker it is considered to be still in a warehouse. That is to say, it is still in bond. Duty has not been paid.’
I nodded. I knew that.
‘As Charter’s tankers carry six thousand imperial gallons,’ Gerard said neutrally, ‘the amount of duty involved in each load is a good deal more than a hundred thousand pounds. The whisky itself, as you know, is of relatively minor worth.’